MirOS News

I (bsiegert@) have been interviewed by
OSWorld,
a Polish news site about open source software. The interview took place
at FOSDEM 2012. I talk about the project, about the community and about
some of the great things when using open source.
Check out the video.

While wtf(1) always has been a bit central to MirBSD, and the acronym database
has been accessible by CVSweb,
what we never had was a DAU compatible (and shellsnippets
compatible) lookup. This has now changed: the above link to
the acronyms file is a persistent link to its latest version
(well, latest when the website was last recompiled), tooltips
may very well follow soon, and we’ve got an online WTF lookup service.
Contributions to the acronym database are welcome, of course;
just eMail them to tg＠mirbsd．org.

Not to stop there, our online
HTML manpage search is also new, shiny, and should replace
the “!mbsdman” DuckDuckGo hash-bang shortly. (Both of
these services offer a DDG search as fallback. Note that DDG is
an external service included herein by linking, under their
request to spread it, and not affiliated with The MirOS Project.
They do, however, donate some advertising money to Debian.)
For all those who didn’t know: only manpages for software in the
MirOS BSD base system and for the MirPorts Framework package tools
are listed, not for third-party applications installable using ports or, recently, pkgsrc®. Still, if you want to have
a peek at a modern classic BSD’s documentation, you’re welcome. (Not
to mention content like re_format(7) and style(9) and that some of
our documentation is much more legible than others.)

And because writing all that perl(1) made me ill, not to
mention I don’t even know that language, I’ve hacked
a bit more in the mir﻿make(1) and mksh(1) parts of the
MirWebsite, finally implementing pointing out where in the
navigation sidebar the visitor currently is.

We also have exciting mksh
porting news involving RT trying a larger number of ancient
platforms than I dare count, me fixing bugs in Linux klibc and
diving into other things, learning more about why I consider me
lucky for hacking a BSD operating system… sorry, I want to keep
this short as it’s mostly an announcement.

The MirWebsite source code
is, of course, also available. Improvements welcome. Except for
these three CGIs, our website is fully statically precompiled,
and that’s a good thing. Please help in making the CGIs secure.

The current “state of the art” in MirBSD land was just uploaded. This
snapshot carries a new patchlevel to show that things happened, such as
a bootloader fix for systems with more than one hard disc; but be aware
we’re not yet finished with all we think must be done. – The entropyKey
software stack has been updated, by the way, and tg@’s shiny new second
stick was inaugurated during this build, so it contains Moarrr Entropy™
in addition to e.g. the mksh(1) fix noted on the mailing list.

The MirOS infrastructure servers will be upgraded to patchlevel 10uB0
shortly.

What’s going on in MirOS Project land? Other than all developers
being buried in dayjob work, of course… (sorry for that, guys; even
tg@ has now succumbed to an ever-growing backlog but will
be back, some time)

tg@ uploaded a new MirBSD-current/i386 snapshot (20111228) plus
a full set of HTML manpages for all architectures (so they all are
in the new amber style), and redid the usual combined i386+sparc
cdrom10.iso Midi-ISO as well as the netboot.me kit. Older
binary packages may no longer be supported: the old libgcc_s DLL
is no longer provided in fixes10.ngz, and it may be time
to reduce the amount of packages in MirPorts to concentrate on
those worth the effort and receiving enough care.

Thanks to bsiegert@’s amazing work, the pkgsrc® kit of anno 2007
could finally be deleted. The page
about pkgsrc® on MirOS describes instructions to use instead.
At some point, we may release a binary bootstrap kit along with
the snapshots as set ready for pickup by the installer.

No MirGRML based on the latest Grml 2011.12 release will be made.
We’ll be investigating a possible solution for a flavour of the
popular GNU/Linux OS to accompany full Triforce Live CDs in the
future (for now, we’ll keep the old MirGRML 2009.10 on them).

We hope to be able to return to investing more spare (heh…) time
into development some time. For now, we apologise for the slowed
down development and reaction even in important subprojects such
as mksh. Occasionally, they do
have updates, e.g. the latest
Jupp/Win32 release, or fixes in CVS.

The packages are self-contained in /usr/pkg: The VARBASE has
been set to /usr/pkg/var, and the package database is in
/usr/pkg/db. This matches the MirPorts defaults and
facilitates using pkgsrc and MirPorts side by side.

In this quarterly release, the new default for MirBSD is to use
“modular” X11, i.e. install Xorg libraries and programs as packages
instead of using the system X libs. This improves the compatibility
with many newer programs, which expect for example that the X libraries
have pkg-config files. This should not change anything for the user,
however.

I hope I don’t need to say too much about the first part; mksh(1)
is packaged in a gazillion of operating environments (dear Planet
readers, that of course includes Debian, which occasionally
gets a development snapshot; I’ll wait uploading R40c until that two
month fixed gcc bug will finally find its way into the
packages for armel and armhf). Ah, we’re getting Arch Linux (after
years) to include mksh now. (Probably because they couldn’t stand
the teasing that Arch Hurd included it one day after having
been told about its existence, wondering why it built without needing
patches on Hurd…) MSYS is a supposedly supported target now, people
are working on WinAPI and DJGPP in their spare time, and Cygwin and
Debian packagers have deprecated pdksh in favour of mksh (thanks!).
So, everything looking well on that front.

I’ve started a
collection of shell snippets some time ago, where most of “those
small things” of mine ends up. Even stuff I write at work – we’re an
Open Source company and can generally publish under (currently) AGPLv3
or (if extending existing code) that code’s licence. I chose git as
SCM in that FusionForge instance so that people would hopefully use it
and contribute to it without fear, as it’s hosted on my current money
source’s servers. (Can just clone it.) Feel free to register and ask
for membership, to extend it (only if your shell-fu is up to the task,
KNOPPIX-style scripts would be a bad style(9) example as the primary
goal of the project is to give good examples to people who learn shell
coding by looking at other peoples’ code).

Maybe you like my editor, too? At
OpenRheinRuhr, the Atari people sure liked it as it uses WordStar®
like key combinations, standardised across a lot of platforms and
vendors (DR DOS Editor, Turbo Pascal, Borland C++ for Windows, …)

ObPromise: a posting to raise the level of ferrophility
on the Planet aggregators this wlog reaches (got pix)

Since these are generated from catmanpages, heuristics are used for
things like where should bold/underline begin/end (since nroff(1) is
not always the brightest… but working on that), and hyperlinks can only
be generated for other manpage references (whose targets may or may not
exist, for example if they aren’t part of MirOS base/XFree86®). But on
the other hand, Valid XHTML/1.1 and CSS speaks for itself ☻☺

Zoltan Arpadffy has let us know that he has set up a MirBSD
installation at polarhome
in Stockholm, to aid its “purpose [to] serve the healthy part
of the already, rather badly MS infected Universe - and MirOS
is definetevly on that part”. He wrote that “MirBSD is a very
nice easy to use BSD system”, thanking us with “gratitude and
respect for developing a such a nice OS”. He also sent a list
of things he ran into while installing (although we can guess
some of them are related to using VirtualBox, which is not at
all supported, as base) so we can fix them, and offered help,
e.g. in adding ports of software they use.Well, Zoltan,
you’re definitively welcome ☺

Almost ☺ in time for FrOSCon there’s a new binary snapshot of
MirBSD-current (10uAF-20110818) compiled, right now waiting for
me to do the usual post-compilation work of preparing the cdrom
and floppy images for serial console, signing and uploading. Of
course, the online manpages will be updated then as well.

This year without our friends from Grml, but The MirOS Project
(all two active developers and our Booth Babe gecko2@) will of
course attend FrOSCon, nicknamed
Froschkon, again.

We’ll have a pre-event meal time at my favourite Jugoslawian
Restaurant on Friday (20:00 CEST) – contact me privately for the
coördinates if interested. On Saturday and Sunday we’ll staff a
booth and answer questions about the many projects we have (more
or less) running, including but not limited to paxmirabilis (aka
MirCPIO), The MirBSD Korn Shell
aka mksh(1), jupp the editor,
and developers’ private projects such as slowly undermining Debian
or Google-Go. While slow we are still working on World Domination.
And teaching
people good shell programming by example code.

We might even bring CDs, but I’m still working on the ISO… last
night’s build aborted because the OS grew a bit making the floppy
image not fit any more. (Solution, drop ping(8) and rtsol(8), but
re-add sf(4) and bce(4) now that they fit again.)

jupp 3.1.17 uploaded
today, mostly thanks to user input suggesting I improve things,
especially the syntax highlighting. (Maybe more to come.) I like
users who don’t complain but give helpful comments and send in
patches even.

Since the Debian FTP masters complain that the NEW queue is
empty for the first time in ages, I also uploaded jupp to Debian
proper (got requests, several, from actual users – independent
of each other). I originally thought I were the only user, it’s
not worth it, maybe too close to joe (which segfaults a lot more
and has some ugly things, so I cherry-picked the better features
of it instead of rebasing jupp), but it’s had a package in mports
(MidnightBSD ports) for ages, users submitted one to FreeBSD® last
year and keep it updated, there’s even a WIP package in pkgsrc®,
and who knows where else or how many people are using my OpenSuSE
Buildservice package or have had installed the previous DEB package
I uploaded to my play repo. So now I feel it worth to upload.

I even invested some major packaging rework, such as
splitting the build-arch and build-indep parts from each other,
and importing the upstream source into the packaging VCS, as I
have learned in the “packaging with git” talk here at DebConf.
(No guys, I will stick to CVS as git doesn’t give me anything.)

mksh R40b (nowadays with filled
in user’s caveats (for R40, too!)
and packager’s upgrade hints) has
just been released. This is a should-have upgrade, fixing a number of –
admittedly some obscure – bugs, changing things begun in R40, improving
upon others. Thanks to the PLD Linux guys for spotting all these errors;
thanks to them and phpnet.org both for adopting mksh so well.

I have also fixed a bug in nroff(1) which will lead to an even
nicer looking HTML manpage mksh(1) (after the next rebuild and upload of
a MirBSD snapshot – scheduled RSN).

jupp 3.1.16 took on the task
of merging Debian joe changes (aiming at an upload). I also split the
jupprc file into three versions (2.8 generic/DOS, 3.1+jupp and 3.7/Unix)
because of the differences in the baseline executables making rc files
partially mutually incompatible (think Insert key), annoyingly warning
(think syntax, hmsg), or less usable (joe’s new menu system).

jupp 2.8.2 is a companion to
jupp 3.1.16 – mostly because of the new help window “character map” ☺

Binaries for jupp should be updated RSN too.

Considering Banja Luka is arriving quickly, the “r” in RSN should be
taken with a few grains of salt. I’ve also scheduled working on the pcc
Debian package for the next future; updating lynx and maybe others like
OpenSSH in MirBSD is also due; cvs(1) will receive more of my time, but
before the next Upload I’d like to fix LP#12230 once verified.

Builds for Debian/m68k are also still running. I note I did in fact
not manage to make a new base image, yet (but 2.6.39 kernels
miss a patch, anyway, so waiting for 3.0 is ok). It’s still using gcc-4.4
because nobody tests gcc-4.6 and gcj-4.6 FTBFS due to SIGSEGV, but that’s
ok in my books. rsyslog is broken but sysklogd works.

Acronyms and translations,
too. (Got Norwegian and Rumanian covered in the meantime. No idea whether any
RTL languages will work in that beast. But I’m young and need the money)

Since I’m writing a wlog entry anyway… let me thank Gunnar for a nice
summary on the current Free Culture discussion; my comments on Nina’s site
seem to be eaten, but let me support it fully, although, of course, I normally
use a copycenter style licence, which
is specifically written for general works of authorship under copyright law,
not limited to software. I did in fact have that in mind. Maybe some people
will like it (it’s less than one Kibibyte long) either generally or just for
their everyday random musings (they can then keep CC-BY-SA for the “big works”
if they so desire).

Automatic removal is harmful, though – I just fell
into the trap since jupprc contains needed whitespace at EOL… but manual
removal (bound to ^K] in jupp) rocks. And I like that your solution uses
such strong a colour – vim users are the single most represented
offender group for actually leaving the redundant whitespace at
EOL there, and it should hurt their eyes. (Sadly there is some
vehement disagreement preventing them from inclusion in grml-etc-core –
but that’s why I re-post them here.) Ah, and jupp can of course display
whitespace visibly (although it uses ‘·’/‘→’, replacing the arrow with ‘¬’
if no UTF-8, not ‘»’), accessible with ^Ov.

Steve, want to put up a checklist for sites? We can “crowdsource” the…
testing… to maybe get some interesting results…

Some other people would get more comments if they were idling in IRC
(Freenode) or allow comments on their blog,
specifically without too high an entrance barrier – OpenID is ok, but many
other things, and ECMAscript, are not; but I can’t really say that loud
because our wlog is static HTML compiled from a flat plaintext data source
so it doesn’t allow such either. I often forget what I wanted to
add if I can’t get it out quickly enough (especially at work). Sowwy…